Umbrella Academy: Number Five’s Best and Worst Traits

He might be pint-sized in stature, but he’s galaxy-sized in flair, personality, genius, arrogance, and ruthlessness. Whilst all of his siblings are 30-something-year old adults with actual names, he is a 58-year-old in the body of a teenager who still goes by “Number Five.”

When he hit Netflix screens in 2019, Five Hargreeves easily and quickly became the most popular sibling of the Umbrella Academy, with only the likes of Klaus challenging him as the series’ most beloved character. He has many traits, both good and bad, that help to make him one of The Umbrella Academy‘s most interesting characters, but some are more noteworthy than others.

Best – His Intelligence

Five Is The Smartest Hargreeves Child

Five is undoubtedly the smartest of the Hargreeves children. Fans can piece together from flashbacks and notes about the children that he was the most precocious of his siblings. As such, he was the one who got away with talking back to (and challenging) their father the most. His ability to teleport through space and time requires him to keep equations in mind, especially with his time-traveling abilities.

A simple, easy-to-make mistake in his calculations was what made him appear in the prime timeline as a 13-year-old with an older man’s consciousness. Who knows what could have happened to him had he made an even bigger mistake in his mathematics? Five constantly proves to have a formidable intellect and a great understanding of not just Math but Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Time-Travel, Superhuman Abilities, and general Commission-based activities.Throughout the show, Five is shown as the man with the plan. He is a capable strategist and tactician, and he is always the first person to come up with a plan to deal with a dilemma and think of ways to save the world.

Worst – His Arrogance

He Knows That He’s Better

“I don’t think I’m better than you. I know I’m better than you” is what Five says to Luther in Season 1 of The Umbrella Academy. This shows that, if there’s one thing Number Five is not known for, it is his humility. Luther was right when he said that Five thinks he is better than everyone, mentioning how this isn’t a new thing for him and that he has always been like this since they were kids.

Five himself does not deny his arrogance and considers it justified. As a highly capable time-space assassin who has been anywhere and everywhere, he has done what he calls ‘unimaginable’ things that Luther cannot even comprehend. But as mentioned before, Five had this arrogance about him even before he ended up lost in time. Viewers see this in a flashback, where he gets very frustrated with his father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, for not allowing him to practise his time-jumping. His father claims it is dangerous and that he is not ready, but Five jumps through time anyway just to prove he can. He pays the price for it, finding himself stuck in the future apocalypse, making for one heck of an origin story.

Best – His Skillfulness

Five Is The Deadliest Time Assassin

Whilst Five is overly arrogant and somewhat of an insufferable genius, he is correct to believe that he is the most capable member of the Umbrella Academy. There’s a reason why this old-timer in a young boy’s body is considered the de-facto leader of the team in spite of being Number Five.

His experience in the apocalypse and working as an assassin for the Commission have made him one of the most skilled individuals in the Umbrella Academy universe. He is easily the best at using his superhuman abilities. At one point, he teleports through a room of assassination targets and kills a few so quickly that he could even be compared to speedsters like Quicksilver and The Flash.

Five, along with Diego and Allison, is one of the best hand-to-hand combatants on the show, and he proves to be the unequivocal best killer around. With a mixture of his abilities and learned skills, he can dodge bullets and take out rooms of multiple gunmen with ease.

Worst – His Bloodthirsty Nature

Five Has A Sadistic Flair

Five was stuck on his own for decades in a world that had already been destroyed. He was found by The Handler and contracted to be an assassin for them, correcting timelines across the multiverse and, in return, being allowed to retire to whatever time period of his choosing. Both the mental strain of constantly surviving on his own for years and the practice of having to kill for work has left Five disconnected from the act of taking a life.

At one point in the series, he calls Luther stupid and naive for having moral scruples about killing people to achieve grander goals. He doesn’t care if he has to kill innocents if it helps him get closer to his goal. Whether it be correcting timelines or saving all of his siblings, he’ll do it with brutal remorselessness.

It can be argued that most of Five’s quickness to kill is explained by the fact that he is often trying to save the world and is in a constant state of attempting to protect his siblings from the worst that the space-time continuum has to offer. But still, in scenes such as the one where he kills the board members in 1982, it seems he tends to go overboard, with his necessary killings entering the territory of sadistic massacres.

Best – His Love For His Family

Pure Sibling Love

The Umbrella Academy Commission Handbook offers information about what some fans’ superpowered favorites would be doing in other timelines had they not been busy training to be superheroes as kids and trying to save the world as adults. Luther is a firefighter, Allison is a politician, and whilst one may think Five would be doing something as daring and dangerous as he does in the show’s timelines, he can typically be found living as a normal family-man in Dublin, Ireland.

This goes to show what Five’s character is truly about – family. It doesn’t matter what he has to do; with pure determination and willpower, he will make sure that his family is safe and protected. His years of isolation during the apocalypse would have sent him madder than he ended up being if he did not have the thought of going back to his family to keep him going.

Family is the greatest motivator for Five. He rarely shows it through the way he treats them, but through the actions he takes, he proves that the well-being of his loved ones is his only concern. In a way, that’s the best ‘sole concern’ to have.